Britain’s Jessie Ware came to light last year and appeared on many Best of 2012 lists with her album Devotion and several singles from it.  We wrote about her torch-singing ways back in July, and if you want to see some more stellar performances (especially the Black Cab Session) by her, go to that post HERE.  Ware’s now on tour in the US and appeared on Jimmy Fallon to play her popular song Wildest Moments with The Roots.  Check it out below.  Girl can sing (oh, and she cleans up well too).  And ya gotta love Quest’s gunshot drumming.  Ware plays LA and San Francisco next week (see the dates below the video).

The interweb is a wondrous thing.  Spin has unearthed the video below by Youtuber “AlRosePromotions” who uploaded a never-aired 2000 VH1 pilot for multitalented Jon Brion’s show.  The great Elliot Smith is featured throughout the pilot.  Check out Brad Mehldau, Elliot Smith and Brion all get in the act in the a free-form session below.  Brion and Smith perform several duets as well.    In addition to his sterling originals, Smith covers of The Kinks’ Waterloo Sunset, John Lennon’s Jealous Guy and Big Star’s Nighttime.  Elliot you are sorely missed!  Watch the entire episode below before someone takes it down.

Santa Monica band Cayucas is coming to Velvet Jones next Wednesday as openers (with Races) for El Ten Eleven.  We unearthed Cayucas last fall when they signed to Secretly Canadian and released their breezy, addicting song Cayucos,with its playful accompanying video (seen way below).  With Central Coast beach-centric lyrics/optics, reverbed vocals and hazy harmonies, the song and video were sure to be hits at Chez Lefort.  The band, which is the brainchild of Zach Yudin, followed up Cayucos with the release in December of their similarly clever, breezy and ’60s-inflected song Swimsuit (just listen below to that organ and handclap ending).  Cayucas sounds a bit like The Beach Boys as interpreted/produced by Animal Collective (minus some of the latter’s distracting density).  We can’t wait to hear what talented producer Richard Swift (of The Shins) does for the young band on their impending new album for Secretly Canadian.  In the meantime, check out both songs and videos below, and get ye to Velvet Jones next Wednesday!

We were decidedly blown away by Charles Bradley when we last caught his act at Soho in the summer of 2011.  It did not hurt Bradley that he was brilliantly backed by one of the best R&B bands we’d ever heard–The Menahan Street Band.  To put it simply, they rolled the joint; but effortlessly and without being peacocky (the tendency of some backup bands). While Bradley worked on new material last year, the Menahans took time to record and release their critically-acclaimed album The Crossing on Daptone Records (naturally).  To get a better feel for the band and album, check out two performances by the band of songs off of The Crossing for KEXP.  The first, Lights Out, features heralding horns followed by ’60s organ and ravishing guitar-play.  Below it, Three Faces starts and ends with Latin swagger, but in between and strewn throughout are some fantastic wah-wah and surf-guitar sounds.  That’s what you want–right there.

Lights Out:

Three Faces:

LA’s Milo Greene was busy last year after garnering attention accompanying Civil Wars on its tour in late 2011.   We caught them at Muddy Waters last February, and then watched as they made the talk show rounds (Letterman and Conan) in support of their eponymous debut album.  We’d lost track of them until we unearthed the video below (via Line of Best Fit and Open Sessions) of them performing their song Perfectly Aligned.  Check out the video’s slight of hand in which the band is driving a VW van and ostensibly singing unplugged (though how DO they attain those reverbed vocals for Marlana Sheetz?).  Regardless, we far prefer this spare version to the album version.  The spare sound found here amplifies the song’s atmospherics.  After, is the song’s official video.

Earlier today Okkervil River’s tremendously talented leader Will Sheff announced that he had gone underground.  Literally.  Sheff explains:  “In the early part of last year I finally got a dedicated recording space. It was something I’d dreamed of having for my whole life but I had never really been able to make it work until then. It’s located in Brooklyn, in a basement down by the East River, a dingy but high-ceilinged room at the end of a long, damp hallway. In the late 90s a writer named John Wray had lived in this one room and he wrote his first novel there, sleeping inside a tent to keep out the rats. I think that story clinched it for me when I was looking at it. I liked the idea of so much thinking happening there. I started going in [to the space] and working every day of the week there, just shutting the door and writing until evening. I decided to do a project there I’d wanted to do for years and years, which is to make an album by myself and for myself, an album that doesn’t owe anything to music I made before. When I finished the album I decided I’d give some the songs away for free since it cost almost nothing to make.  The name of the project is Lovestreams.”

With Lovestreams, Sheff has gone Postal (Service) and taken a page out of Ben Gibbard’s electronic book (although Sheff’s is a solo side-project).  Today Sheff has released new song Shock Corridor under the Lovestreams moniker.  And now we can’t stop hitting repeat (at eleven, and not holding) and re-reading the song’s lyrics.  Once again, Sheff has combined a scintillating soundtrack with carefully honed, cutting lyrics, and destroyed us.  Sheff has done so for years in the primarily guitar-driven Okkervil River, but the new machined-sounds mesh perfectly with the word-alliterati on these basement-tapes.  There are few in music writing lyrics as incisive as Sheff’s (only John Darnielle, John K. Samson, Conor Oberst (say what you will, haters), and Leonard Cohen immediately come to mind).  Anyone writing lyrics as stirring and penetrating as the following deserves your undivided attention: “A pictorial of you alone in your room, fighting off suicide furiously, with the Astronettes bootleg and a bent-back spoon,” and “A lie for a single pageview[Lefort–don’t we know], courtesy of the assailant-who-loves-you,” and “So punch the day in the face and charge through a haze of gorse [Lefort-nice gisduise], behind you, your own mother’s living ghost tears her hair out.”  Pick out your own favorites below.  We can’t wait to hear more from Sheff and Lovestreams.   Listen to this great song below and can go HERE to download your own copy.

Shock Corridor

A life lifted off a news page.
A pictorial of you alone in your room, fighting off suicide furiously, with the Astronettes bootleg and a bent-back spoon.
A bus tour through drab poverty.
I came over and you offered me the guest room.
A lie for a single pageview, courtesy of the assailant-who-loves-you.
Advice for the heartsick clergyman.
The snake in the grass and the ghost at the feast, the jack of all asses and the last of the least are all flown, first-class, to the team retreat.
The inventor of anger.
The perfector of being distracted when someone is talking to you, but just slightly – super slightly.
She said, “I don’t care who you are and don’t care what you were – you can’t look away from the Shock Corridor.”
So punch the day in the face and charge through a haze of gorse.
Behind you, your own mother’s living ghost tears her hair out.
It’s freedom – don’t you want it?
A light haze of rain dark-flecks the grey slate.
The actor can’t escape from his cold oval.
Blazed-out hours, rolling, cold and (relatively) sober, as she says, “I don’t care who you are and don’t care what you were – you can’t get away from the Shock Corridor.”
When there was nothing left to talk about, we talked specifically about a white-hot penny plunging through the concrete and hissing into that buried river.
Or cutting into the earth’s red-hot sobbing heart.
And I’m sorry I was a shit.
I didn’t know why I was doing it.
I’m not needed, and why would you really want to hear my voice even?
I’m the light from a star that deserved to implode, and did, six million years ago.
I’m the Orange Crush can, crumpled in the woods, when the kid who tossed it is going through his third divorce.
I used to lie back in my teenage bed and feel love – so much heart-busting love, just this surge of love for everything, everything, everything…
Now I lie on the couch with my brains bashed out and my tools and my toys all lying around, and I wish I could feel that way about really anything, anything, anything, anything…
Still, she says, “I don’t care who you are and don’t care what you were.
You can’t get away from the Shock Corridor.”

Former Girls singer Christopher Owens yesterday released his critically-acclaimed first solo album Lysandre on Turnstile/Fat Possum.  You can buy/stream the album HERE.  We loved San Francisco band Girls (and especially their live show at modest Muddy Waters in December 2008) so the anticipation for Lysandre has been high at Chez Lefort.

The album was evidently written, recorded and sequenced as a depiction of Girls’ first tour in the summer of 2008.  Owens has described Lysandre as “a coming of age story, a road trip story, a love story.” Written largely in one creative stint and recorded with Girls producer Doug Boehm, Lysandre follows Owens from San Francisco to New York City and on to the French Riviera before a melancholy return home.

In some ways Lysandre is not a huge departure from Girls (with fuzz guitar, Owens’ sympathetic vocals and compellingly confessional lyrics), but in other ways it is.  There’s more of a Brit-pop feel to it (with flutes ferheavensake, as first heard on single Here We Go).  And there’s a far cleaner production overall with (for better or worse) some of the great Girls’ grit scrubbed off.  As you’ll hear, there’s more variety on Lysandre than on Girls’ albums.  A Broken Heart sounds like early Rolling Stones balladry, while Riviera Rock is (to fit the title?) cocktail-loungey, reggae-jazz dub.  The album’s title track borders on ’60s bubble-gum pop (with plenty of flute), but is followed by the beautiful heartbreak balladry of Everywhere You Knew.  The album ends well with Part of Me with its Gentle-On-My-Mind intro and subsequent gentle-jangle (there’s that flute again).  Christopher Owens is on a solo journey that merits your attention.

Owens and his 7-piece Lysandre band are heading out on tour starting tonight in Chicago, and have just added West Coast dates in March that go on sale this week.  Note the unique West Coast venues in the list below.

2013 US Tour Dates

January 15                 Chicago, IL                          Lincoln Hall
January 16                Ferndale, MI                        Magic Bag
January 18                Toronto, ON                         The Mod Club
January 19                Montreal,  QC                       Cabaret Du Mile-End
January 21                New York, NY                      Bowery Ballroom
January 22                New York, NY                      Bowery Ballroom
January 25                Boston, MA                           Paradise Rock Club
January 26                Philadelphia, PA                 Union Transfer
January 27                Washington, DC                  9:30 Club

March 21                  San Diego, CA                        Irenic
March 22                 Los Angeles, CA                    Wilshire Ebell Theatre
March 23                 San Francisco, CA                Palace of Fine Arts
March 25                 Santa Cruz, CA                       Rio Theatre
March 28                 Seattle, WA                             Neptune
March 29                 Vancouver, BC                      Biltmore Cabaret
March 30                 Portland, OR                          Star Theater
March 31                  Eugene, OR                            WOW Hall

We are big fans of the Arctic Monkeys’ guitar-based grit, but especially the vocals and carefully-crafted lyrics of leader/singer Alex Turner (Turner’s songs for Submarines’ soundtrack resonated too if you haven’t heard).  They’ve been turning heads and ears since 2005, and to this day we can still hit repeat on some of their songs (Riot Van is a personal favorite amongst many) and albums (our favorite remains their first–Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not).  As great as they are, we have long-anticipated additional melody and variety from the Monkeys to enthrall all and push them over the top in the U.S.  But they still haven’t found what we’re looking for (entirely).

Fast forward to London band Various Cruelties, their frontman Liam O’Donnell and their eponymous debut album.  There’s no denying that O’Donnell’s vocals sound uncannily like Alex Turner’s.  But Various Cruelties have managed to vary the sound some and sweeten its melodic tendencies by adding R& B allusions.  They’re being dubbed “an alternative indie soul incarnation that fuses classic British guitar pop with Stax grooves to create a form of shabby Motown pop.”  We don’t know about that, but check out below the video for their single, If It Wasn’t For You.  The slow-burn song is as catchy as chlamydia, and so much so that it is being featured in TV commercials (Zales) and continuing to connect.  The song’s video has over a million aggregate Youtube hits,  and the song has been a Top 20 single in the US iTunes alternative charts for a month.  They’ve been taking some heat from critics for being a titch too commercial and lyrically banal, but their burgeoning fan base would beg to differ.  Time will tell if Various Cruelties can build on its current momentum and transcend.  If you want to assess in person, the band will play Webster Hall in New York City on February 19th and the Bootleg Bar in Los Angeles on February 21st.  We’ll check ’em out, assess their album further and keep you apprised.

Well what took ya so long?  With songs as strong as we’ve heard from his first solo album, The Messenger, we can’t help but wonder why former Smiths’ songwriter and guiding-guitarist Johnny Marr has taken decades to put out his own album.  Following The Smiths’ demise, however, Marr became a songwriting, guitar-playing gunslinger of sorts, working with Kristy MacColl, Billy Bragg, Oasis, The Pretenders, The The, Electronic (with some of the New Order orderlies), Modest Mouse (Marr’s guitar playing and sound at the band’s 2007 Santa Barbara Bowl show are still deeply embedded in our minds), and countless other projects.  All of which served, in our ever-so-humble opinion, to mar Johnny’s personal endeavors.  Marr did pull together a couple of bands (The Healers and The Cribs), but is only now getting ’round to recording and releasing a personalized record.  If the new albums’ first two songs (the title track and now Upstarts) are any indication, The Messenger could very well end up on our Best Albums of 2013 list.  Time will tell.  Check it out below.

Talented Montreal band The Besnard Lakes will release their fourth album Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO on April 2nd.  Marrieds Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas produced, recorded and mixed the record, which features lofty, prog-ish sounds amongst their expansive songs.  Check out below the first song, People of the Sticks, released from the album.  After, a just-released video of the band interviewed and (at 2:15) performing their great song Chicago Train from their last album for “The Neighbor’s Dog” series [Warning:  includes gratuitous flute before the fuzz and jangle which kicks in nicely at 6:33].  The new album’s track list follows way at the bottom.

Until In Excess, Imperceptible UFO Track List:

1. 46 Satires
2. And Her Eyes Were Painted Gold
3. People Of The Sticks
4. The Specter
5. At Midnight
6. Catalina
7. Colour Yr Lights In
8. Alamogordo